In today’s episode, I’m going to be answering the question: Are you overcomplicating your marketing?
I have a really simple startup marketing plan that will help you to grow your business really quickly.
Let’s dive on in.
I’ll be honest with you, when I ask women who are starting their business what they’re doing in order to get their business growing, and growing their audiences, I feel tired just listening to all the different things that they’re doing.
They are:
- On Instagram
- On Facebook
- Using a website
- On Pinterest
- Doing SEO
- Going to networking events
- Going to conferences
- In structured referral networks
- Planning to do affiliates
- Running webinars
- Creating challenges
- Going to write a book
They’ve got so many things going on in order to try and grow their business.
If this is resonating with you by just reading this, I just want to let you know that it doesn’t have to be that hard.
Particularly when you’re first starting out in business, you don’t want to be spreading yourself thin amongst dozens of different strategies to market yourself.
You want to be focusing on the things that work and making the things that you’ve decided to focus on work as effectively as possible before you add anything else to the equation.
For so many people, I think the reason why we overcomplicate it is because there’s so much advice out there in the online business world about what you must be doing in order to be successful online.
I just saw a post in a Facebook group that I’m in, and the opening line was, “If you are not on LinkedIn every day, you are losing money”. This is just the same fear-based stuff that gets women so tied up in knots about what they should and shouldn’t be doing in order to grow their business, and it leaves you confused.
First and foremost, people are telling you that you HAVE to do a specific strategy because they are going to sell you a course on how to do that strategy. They’re going to sell you coaching on how to do that strategy.
Look at it for what it is.
Of course, everyone’s got their opinions and their ideas about what it takes to grow a business and what the best strategy is. But at the end of the day, if they’re trying to convince you that their one thing is the only way to do it, either:
a. They have a vested interest in you believing that because they’re going to sell something to you.
b. That’s the only way that they know how to do it, so they’d prefer that you believe that that’s the best way because that’s the way that they specialise in.
I want to share with you my simple three-part marketing plan.
You can use this three-part marketing plan, regardless of whether you:
- Decide to focus on a different platform
- Are an introvert or an extrovert
- Want to work with people one-to-one or one-to-many
- Want to sell high ticket or low ticket
However you want to grow your business, this simple three-part marketing plan is a really beautiful way for you to keep your marketing strategy contained.
Focus on what works, and make the things you choose to focus on work more effectively. We want to get you to the point where you’re making consistent, reliable, predictable, sustainable income from your marketing efforts in your business.
Sound good? I think it’s really sexy and really simple.
The beautiful thing is, this three-part marketing plan can be tailored to your specific strengths, your specific niche, your specific market, and it can absolutely work for everyone.
This three-part marketing plan is:
1. Reach the right people
2. Convert the right people into paying clients
3. Nurture your mindset
That is my three-part startup marketing plan.
Until you are making $5,000 to $10,000 a month in your business, you don’t need to do anything more complex than that.
With the simplicity of that marketing plan, you should be able to be having five to ten really high-quality lead conversations with people about whether working with you is the right fit, and converting a good chunk of those people into paying clients.
It’s very reasonable to expect that you’re making a good $5,000 to $10,000 a month out of that very simple marketing plan.
I have used this simple marketing plan to hit $25,000 a month in my business. I have helped women in startup use this marketing plan to hit $15,000 a month, $20,000 a month, $30,000 a month and I even had a client who had a $45,000 month with a very simple marketing plan based on this.
Reach, conversion, mindset.
The key to keeping this simple is to pick one strategy per step.
1. Reach the right people
For your reach, have one focus point – how are you going to get in front of the right people for your product or service?
You could:
- Focus on an SEO based strategy with your website using Pinterest for SEO
- Decide that you’re going to use Facebook ads
- Post in Facebook communities
- Use Instagram posts and Instagram stories with hashtags
- Use LinkedIn (for that person who said that if you’re not using LinkedIn, you’re losing money)
So you have your one key way of achieving that outcome in your marketing strategy.
What is your strategy to reach the right people? Do you have ONE that is better than all the others? And are you dedicating the majority of your time on reach to the one that works?
Or have you been getting some traction in Facebook groups, some traction on Instagram, some traction on LinkedIn, some traction from networking events, some traction from doing guest posts and podcasts, some traction from Pinterest and visitors to your website, and you’re doing none of them particularly well, you’re just doing all of them pretty poorly.
That’s the situation that I see so many people trapped in. They think they need to do everything, and in the end, they end up doing none of them particularly effectively.
Or they’ve got one strategy that’s actually working really well for them, but they don’t put any time or energy into that strategy because they’re so busy chasing shiny objects that are gonna get them more reach, more high-quality clients and much better conversions. They’ve been convinced that they’re missing out, and their FOMO (fear of missing out) has driven them away from the strategy that was actually working for them in the first place.
Beware of FOMO.
Of course, some of those strategies are scalable, and some of them are not.
For example, posting in other people’s Facebook groups is not particularly scalable. If you want to go and reach more people, you’re going to need to be in more groups and you’re going to have to put more time in.
But when you are initially growing your business and marketing your business in Facebook communities, and you have done that consistently, you are testing your messaging, making sure you’ve got your niche sorted, practising your sales conversations, your conversions, and working out what the best product or service is for your ideal client.
All of those things can then be applied to a more scalable marketing strategy.
It does not need to be completely scalable out of the gate. You don’t need 4,000 leads to make a sale, you need one quality lead to make a sale – that is all it takes.
Instead of looking for strategies that get you thousands of reach and really low-quality leads, low-quality reach, low connection reach, and it’s not actually working for you, focus on strategies that get you high connection, and therefore that makes your conversion strategy (part two of this) so much simpler and easier.
2. Convert the right people into paying clients
Again, the secret is to choose ONE conversion strategy.
You might choose Instagram to be your reach strategy, and your conversion strategy is to get people engaging in direct messages with you, and having lots and lots of direct message conversations with people.
I was just working with a VIP client a couple of weeks ago, and she told me that she doesn’t really have a promo strategy for her VIP work, it’s just that whenever she does Instagram stories, Facebook stories or Lives, she has three or four people private messaging her asking how they can work with her. And that’s actually a strategy. It’s a really beautiful strategy because it’s high connection, high conversion and it’s getting her lots of client inquiries who are then turning into paying clients.
It’s a strategy, it’s just that she didn’t realise it was a strategy, and it’s working really well.
When I was talking to this particular client, she was thinking that she needed to set up an automated funnel and automated webinars in order to get VIP clients in. She was really worried that she wasn’t doing the right things to get VIP clients in the door. But her strategy was working really beautifully.
Remember: Don’t fix it if it’s not broken.
Your strategy for conversion could be as simple as direct message strategy.
Run a webinar as a start-up business strategy
It could be a little bit more complicated and you could run a live webinar each month.
I really love a live webinar because there are so many add-on benefits for the long term growth of your business with that as your conversion strategy.
My initial reach strategy when I first started my business was getting my offer out onto social media and into Facebook communities. My conversion strategy was then offering a two-hour low-cost introductory session with me. About 60% of the people who did an introductory session with me ended up working as a VIP in a longer-term one-to-one working relationship.
That was my strategy.
To be honest with you, I went to a bunch of webinars in about my sixth and seventh month of business because I’d hit a 20K month in month six, a 10-12K month in month seven, and I was worried that my strategies weren’t scalable.
I was seeing all of these fear-based things about ‘missing out on money’, and ‘not doing it right’, blah, blah, blah.
So I was going to these webinars, and they were basically telling me that what I was doing wasn’t scalable, it wasn’t going to work so I shouldn’t do that anymore because I have to sell courses, it has to be passive and it had to be leveraged.
I totally second-guessed my business and ended up sucking the income out of it because according to these people, I wasn’t supposed to work one-to-one with people, it’s trading dollars for hours so it’s not scalable.
Meanwhile, I’d been making 20K a month and growing my business really organically with fun and easy things.
Yet here I was being led to believe I was doing it the wrong way.
3. Nurture your mindset
When it comes to mindset, I always say the most powerful mindset practise is one in which you can notice, uncover and clear out any of the limiting beliefs and mindset blocks that come up for you as you go.
Your mindset practise might be that you:
- Work with a practitioner
- Have a regular tapping practise (EFT)
- Journal every single day
- Listen to positive affirmations
I don’t mind what your mindset strategy is, but I really do think that it’s so valuable for you to find your one key thing in each of those three stages.
If you can just focus on making those work, you will simplify your marketing strategy, make your business so much more enjoyable, get to choose the one thing that you love and enjoy doing the most, and you get to easily create business growth and momentum.
It will allow you to easily learn how to get the right messaging, the right sales, ask the right questions and understand your ideal client really deeply in a way that helps you facilitate a big transformation for them. You will really create that connection and engagement so that your audience continues to snowball and grow.
How amazing is that?
Find the ONE thing.
The thing with this is that when you simplify your marketing strategy right down the way that I’m suggesting, what ends up happening is if it doesn’t work, you can identify what’s not working and why it’s not working.
Let’s say your reach strategy is Instagram. You’re posting on Instagram consistently, using hashtags, learning all of the tips and tricks on how to reach new people on Instagram and get in front of all the right audiences, and yet you’re not reaching anyone on Instagram. You’re not getting any engagement and it’s not working.
By having committed to that as your reach strategy, if it’s not working, you know that it’s not actually the strategy that’s the problem, it’s actually your messaging and niching.
Anyone can grow an audience on Instagram.
Every market has an Instagram based audience that you can grow.
If you’re learning the Instagram tips, tricks, tools and strategies, you’re implementing them and doing the right things, but it’s not getting you the results, the issue is not Instagram.
The issue is not your Instagram strategy, it’s your niche and messaging.
It also helps you to be much more precise about what needs to be fixed if things aren’t making progress and achieving results for you in your business.
Similarly, if your conversion strategy is to use webinars and you put together a webinar and don’t get enough signups or you get lots of signups but no one converts into the sale, the issue is not the webinar.
The issue is not the strategy, it’s not the vessel that you use to get the result, it’s the niche and the messaging within that vessel that clearly isn’t working.
By simplifying your strategy down, not only do you make it easier for yourself to implement that marketing strategy in your business, you also make it easier to work out what’s not working and what needs to be improved.
It makes it MUCH easier for you to see when you change something, what the impact of that change is.
You don’t have fifteen different things all going on at once and you change something here and you change something there and then all of a sudden you’ve got a little bit of extra momentum (but have no idea why so you just keep doing all fifteen things).
You’re creating the simplicity for yourself, which makes it so much easier.
If that sounds really appealing to you and you would love to start growing your business with a very simple startup strategy, I have a great free resource for you.
It’s called Fast Track Your Startup.
It’s an hour and a bit of video training in which I take you through how you can get from where you are to consistent income in your business the fast way. It’s all about building your business and getting money in the door quickly by building a business to your innate strengths.
I’d love for you to go and check that out
As always, come on over to the Heart-Centred, Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs Facebook group, use #podcastaha, let me know you’ve been listening to episode number 226, ask your questions, share your lightbulb moments, and tell me what you’re going to simplify in your business.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
